To get an idea of Donald Ray Pollock's astonishing new book, one could try to imagine a drunken punch-up between a redneck Hemingway and an amphetamine-fuelled Raymond Carver... A fiendishly enjoyable collection

Pollock's writing is lean and unflinching. His economical prose excels in its lurid (and often scatological) detail, and his physical descriptions are superb. The book is laced with dry, black humour

Like Denis Johnson, Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver before him, Pollock populates his stories with low-lives and junkies, dreamers and drunks...He is a master of voice and phrasing, and there are some knockout, pitch-perfect sentences.... Pollock treats readers to inventive, melodic and captivating storytelling. It may be as ragged as junkies' jeans, but this has the potential to be a whiskey-stained classic

The majority of the inhabitants of Knockemstiff, Ohio ... seem straight out of John Boorman's film Deliverance ... Life experience shows in this exceptional collection

What makes this an enjoyable read is Pollock's aptitude for a funny gag in the guise of amazingly inventive language

A serious, moving, funny, dark collection

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock is the best book I have ever read. This is the America they don't let you see on television. This is real literature. It will be read for centuries

It's as if you put David Lynch, Denis Johnson, and a drunk speed freak body builder into a blender. The result are some of the darkest, wildest, most messed up, hilarious stories I've ever read. Knockemstiff is really something

Ian McEwan writes to shock and succeeds... All his stories have a feeling of impending evil - it is a tour de force of concision, and funny, too, in a deadpan manner

His writing is exact, tender, funny, voluptuous, disturbing

A brilliant performance

The Maestro

McEwan has - a style and a vision of life of his own... No one interested in the state and mood of contemporary Britain can afford not to read him

A sparkling and adventurous writer